No, of course not. A lot of this feedback is making it back up. We (WT) were a prime example. We are way outside the usual third party viewpoint. We were brought on specifically to build out some parts of the SDK and make them modernized and add our viewpoint to the mix. And this plays into your second point. As I mentioned, my goal is to democratize a lot of this with better tooling and APIs, but it is going to be evolutionary over the next year or two as there’s a lot of work to be done. And the new AnswerHub, which will be more open, will also enable better MSFS team to developer communication. There is definitely an awareness that better back and forth is needed, but doing so via the forums has become drinking the firehose, so to speak.
Sandboxing is industry standard these days; allowing processes like games that have fairly low level access to load arbitrary untrusted code is just not a good idea. Just look at the drubbing Cyberpunk took for their code load vulnerability. Consumers expect that third parties can’t load things that are unsafe. I understand that from a practical perspective that hasn’t been a problem yet (although there are a couple of historical FSX examples, they aren’t the rule), but regardless it’s important in 2021.
I agree that having some sanctioned, safe, and high performance communication solution would be a good thing. We’ve been discussing that in the context of how to move data between the JS side and the WASM side, for example. There are already some solutions getting data in and out: on the JS side you can run an external process (it doesn’t even have to be local, could be anywhere on the LAN or WAN/cloud) and communicate to JS via websockets, for example. On the WASM side you can use SimConnect client events to transmit data. The SimConnect client events solution is a bit limited, of course, but those are some options presently if you need to move data to external processes.
We are actively working on making the sim autopilot and associated vars much easier to work with and write to for overriding scenarios. I don’t know when those features will land yet, but it is something we are definitely tackling.
-Matt | Working Title